Tim Winton Quotes & Sayings

Surviving is the strongest memory I have; the sense of having walked on water. — Tim Winton

She was still glad she looked like Scully. He wasn't pretty either, but pretty people weren't the kind you need. Pretty people saw themselves in the mirror and were either too happy or too sad. People like Billie just shrugged and didn't care. She didn't want to turn into anyone pretty. Anyway, she had scars now, you only had to look. — Tim Winton

Keely's pulse quickened. A stab of apprehension. He was the same at any live performance, suddenly anxious for the players. So stupid; these people were professional muscicians. But the way his throat narrowed they could have all been kds at a school recital. His kids. — Tim Winton

Everyone will tell you your goal is impossible, pointless, stupid, wasteful. So you hang tough. You back yourslef and only yourself. — Tim Winton

It's sadness coming on like the old days, the vast seamless hopeless weight of sadness looking for a place to rest. — Tim Winton

And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light. — Tim Winton

Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water's edge. — Tim Winton

It's how I fill the time when nothing's happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy. — Tim Winton

Here, said the nuggety bald fixture. You look dry as a camel's cookie. — Tim Winton

I liked books - the respite and privacy of them - books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free. — Tim Winton

It's funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it's all you ever think about. — Tim Winton

Keep the day ahead of you, that's what the old man used to say. — Tim Winton

It's terrifying to think you can remember things you shouldn't possibly be able to. It's like that childhood fear of having your soul slip from your body in your sleep. The darkness, those black sheets of glass sliding over you, upping the pressure, pushing you through the time and space and story. — Tim Winton

Summer came whirling out of the night and stuck fast. One morning late in November everybody got up at Cloudstreet and saw the white heat washing in through the windows. The wild oats and buffalo grass were brown and crisp. The sky was the color of kerosene. The air was thin and volatile. Smoke rolled along the tracks as men began to burn off on the embankment. Birds cut singing down to a few necessary phrases, and beneath them in the streets, the tar began to bubble. The city was full of Yank soldiers; the trams were crammed to standing with them. The river sucked up the sky and went flat and glittery right down the middle of the place and people went to it in boats and britches and barebacked. Where the river met the sea, the beaches ran north and south, white and broad as highways in a dream, and men and babies stood in the surf while gulls hung in the haze above, casting shadows on the immodest backs of the oilslicked women. — Tim Winton

And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you. — Tim Winton

People are fools, not monsters — Tim Winton

He was free and unencumbered. Which is to say alone and unemployed. — Tim Winton

People do change - individuals, families, nations - and the pace of transformation need not be geological. — Tim Winton

Everything was normal and right. There were dishes in the sink and the sound of kids playing in the street and the trains passing smutty wind. Something had settled over the kitchen. Rose kept the colours inside the lines and all the patterns were proper, sensible and neat. Happiness. That's what it was. — Tim Winton

That eye ... was like a fuckin hole in the universe — Tim Winton

Yet however comforting and peaceful beach-combing is, it ends up like the sea, as disturbing as it is reassuring. In dark moments I believe that walking on a beach at low tide is to be looking for death, or at least anticipating it. You will only find the dead, the spilled and the cast-off. Things torn free of their life or their place. — Tim Winton

Shit, he said as a great, green glut of water poured up at our feet. I wonder what the ordinary people are doin today. — Tim Winton

Life was something you didn't argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was. And death. — Tim Winton

We rise to a challenge and set a course. We take a decision. You put your mind to something. Just deciding to do it gets you halfway there. Daring to try. — Tim Winton

It's the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, compassion, art, love. All of them pointless. But they're what keeps life from being meaningless. — Tim Winton

You can hide in someone else's rage - it blinds them — Tim Winton

For every moment the sea is peace and relief, there is another when it shivers and stirs to become chaos. It's just as ready to claim as it is to offer. — Tim Winton

There is nowhere else I'd rather be, nothing else I would prefer to be doing. I am at the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings. — Tim Winton

Writing a book is a bit like surfing," he said. "Most of the time you're waiting. And it's quite pleasant, sitting in the water waiting. But you are expecting that the result of a storm over the horizon, in another time zone, usually, days old, will radiate out in the form of waves. And eventually, when they show up, you turn around and ride that energy to the shore. It's a lovely thing, feeling that momentum. If you're lucky, it's also about grace. As a writer, you roll up to the desk every day, and then you sit there, waiting, in the hope that something will come over the horizon. And then you turn around and ride it, in the form of a story. — Tim Winton

The ocean is a supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared. — Tim Winton

I invested them with a bogus nobility. To a suburban kid they seemed so special, enduring, wild and stiff-necked, in amongst the ancient rocks and gnarled trees, and while it was true enough they carried their secret places in their bodies and in their language, many simply wore their ordinary, dreary undigested pasts like rain-sodden greatcoats and lived like cripples. — Tim Winton

The gospel of perpetual economic growth carries in its train the salvation promise of a life bigger and better for everyone. But this greater good is often mythical. The actual experience of believers rarely bear out the claims of their faith. Even so, many adherents cleave stubbornly, fearfully to orthodoxy. I guess it's what they know. — Tim Winton

I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living
— Tim Winton

There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we've created ourselves. — Tim Winton

Hoping is what people do when they're too lazy to do anything else. People — Tim Winton

Somewhere a bicycle bell rings. Somewhere else there's a war on. Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light the sky with their burning. Somewhere a war is over. — Tim Winton

I just sit here and tell the story as though I can't help it. There's always something in the day that reminds me, that sets me off all hot and guilty and scared and rambling and wistful, like I am now. — Tim Winton

Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers — Tim Winton

I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have — Tim Winton

And somehow, somewhere along the track, I went numb. I couldn't say what it was & didn't dare try. How do you explain the sense of being made to feel improper ? I withdrew into a watchful rectitude, anxious to please, risking nothing. I followed the outline of my life, carefully rehearsing form without conviction, like a bishop who can't see that his faith has become an act. — Tim Winton

The night is full of stories. They float up like miasmas, as though the dead leave their dreams in the earth where you bury them, only to have them rise to meet you in sleep. Mostly the scenes are familiar, but sometimes everything is strange, the people unknown. — Tim Winton

You look great, he said. Oh, get fucked, she said, grinning. — Tim Winton

Thinks the sun shines out yer clacker. — Tim Winton

When I was a girl I had this strong feeling that I didn't belong anywhere, ... It was in my head, what I thought and dreamt, what I believed ... , that's where I belonged, that was my country. — Tim Winton

I came home at dusk with my ears ringing from the quiet. — Tim Winton

It's impossible to imagine what Australia would be like without surfing. — Tim Winton

She wondered if you could love someone too much. If you could it wasn't fair. People didn't have a chance. Love was all you had in the end. It was like sleep, like clean water. When you fell off the world there was still love because love made the world. That's what she believed. That's how it was. — Tim Winton

Ah, but you, Darkness, you know all this. I tell you night after night. Nothing will shock you. Maybe I go on at you in the hope that there's something beyond you. Some nights I sit here and talk and sob and stare out into the blackness thinking that if I look hard enough I'll see the light behind. But I stay out until the break of day, waiting, hoping, and there's only sunrise again. — Tim Winton

Time doesn't click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, billows, falls back on itself. When a wave breaks, the water is not moving. The swell has traveled great distances but only the energy is moving, not the waves. Perhaps time moves through us and not through it. — Tim Winton

It's dark already and I'm out here again, talking, telling the story to the quiet night. — Tim Winton

I love the sea but it does not love me. The sea is like a desert in that it is quite rightly feared. The sea and the desert are both hungry, they have things to be getting on with so you do not go into them lightly. — Tim Winton

I meant to slip away, he said, busking it now. — Tim Winton

The past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over. — Tim Winton

And as an artist, as someone who writes stories and tries to make words into beautiful forms, it's vitally important to me, especially in a culture that's forgotten the value of beauty. It's a primary source or inspiration, I guess, when so much of what goes on around you is only about money and big swinging dick capitalism. It's important for blokes to be able to do beautiful stuff, impractical stuff, that adds to life. That's an early life-lesson from surfing.
— Tim Winton

I don't believe there's anything cosmic or divine or morally superior about whales and dolphins or sharks or trees, but I do think that everything that lives is holy and somehow integrated; and on cloudy days I suspect that these extraordinary phenomena, and the hundreds of tiny, modest versions no one hears about, are an ocean, an earth, a Creator, something shaking us by the collar, demanding our attention, our fear, our vigilance, our respect, our help. — Tim Winton

Hunting and gathering are in my blood. But I've lived long enough to witness a diminution in the seas, and to notice a fragility where once I saw - or assumed - an endless bounty. — Tim Winton

Time to experiment. Necessity being the motherfucker of whatever is in its way. — Tim Winton

There's things that have no finish, Scully, no ending to speak of. There's no justice to it, but that's the God's truth. The only end some things have is the end you give em. — Tim Winton

Being afreaid proves you're alive and awake. — Tim Winton

Old Scully, who according to Jennifer, hadn't the imagination to think the worst. Something she said once, as though neurosis was an artform. — Tim Winton

The whole underneath of Paris was an ant nest, Metro tunnels, sewer shafts, catacombs, mines, cemeteries. She'd been down in the city of bones where skulls and femurs rose in yellowing walls. Right down there, win the square before them. through a dinky little entrance, were the Roman ruins like honeycomb. The trains went under the river. There were tunnels people had forgotten about. It was a wonder Paris stood up at all. The bit you saw was only half of it. Her skin burned, thinking of it. The Hunchback knew. Up here in the tower of Notre Dame he saw how it was. Now and then, with the bells rattling his bones, he saw it like God saw it
inside, outside, above and under
just for a moment. The rest of the time he went back to hurting and waiting like Scully out there crying in the wind. — Tim Winton

The beachcomber goes looking for trouble, everything he finds is a sign of trouble. The writer is the same; without trouble he has nothing to work with, so he picks over the tide line, over the bits and pieces of people's lives with grim fascination. — Tim Winton

I have never been a violent man. Just a little creepy, it seems. — Tim Winton

Inside those waves our voices bounced back at us, deeper and larger for all the noise, like the voices of men. — Tim Winton

So you've given away the old good and evil? asked Rose, amazed at all this rare talk from Quick.
No. No. I'll stay a cop. But it's not us and them anymore. It's us and us and us. It's always us. That's what they never tell you. Geez, Rose, I just want to do right. But there's no monsters, only people like us. Funny, but it hurts. — Tim Winton

When you're surfing you're not thinking about where you parked the car or what you're going to do when you grow up or what you're going to buy when you've got lots of money. You know, you're just there. You're in the moment. And I think in a contemporary world, that's a rare privilege. — Tim Winton

The desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism. — Tim Winton

Dirt music, Fox tells Georgie, is anything you can play on a verandah or porch, without electricity. — Tim Winton

Rare as rocking-horse turds, these days, feeling halfway to decent, with barely a sick twinge, and he was damned if he'd waste — Tim Winton

He was poor and foolish and people will always have a place in their hearts for the harmless. — Tim Winton